In the following, the background of the invention will be briefly explained in order to facilitate the understanding of the invention and the advantages thereof. During the past decade, big efforts have been put on creating the possibility to digitally store and distribute audio contents with good bitrate efficiency. One important achievement on this way is the definition of the International Standard ISO/IEC 14496-3. Part 3 of this Standard is related to an encoding and decoding of audio contents, and subpart 4 of part 3 is related to general audio coding. ISO/IEC 14496 part 3, subpart 4 defines a concept for encoding and decoding of general audio content. In addition, further improvements have been proposed in order to improve the quality and/or to reduce the bit rate that may be used.
According to the concept described in said Standard, a time-domain audio signal is converted into a time-frequency representation. The transform from the time-domain to the time-frequency-domain is typically performed using transform blocks, which are also designated as “frames”, of time-domain samples. It has been found that it is advantageous to use overlapping frames, which are shifted, for example, by half a frame, because the overlap allows to efficiently avoid (or at least reduce) artifacts. In addition, it has been found that a windowing should be performed in order to avoid the artifacts originating from this processing of temporally limited frames.
By transforming a windowed portion of the input audio signal from the time-domain to the time-frequency domain, an energy compaction is obtained in many cases, such that some of the spectral values comprise a significantly larger magnitude than a plurality of other spectral values. Accordingly, there are, in many cases, a comparatively small number of spectral values having a magnitude, which is significantly above an average magnitude of the spectral values. A typical example of a time-domain to time-frequency domain transform resulting in an energy compaction is the so-called modified-discrete-cosine-transform (MDCT).
The spectral values are often scaled and quantized in accordance with a psychoacoustic model, such that quantization errors are comparatively smaller for psychoacoustically more important spectral values, and are comparatively larger for psychoacoustically less-important spectral values. The scaled and quantized spectral values are encoded in order to provide a bitrate-efficient representation thereof.
For example, the usage of a so-called Huffman coding of quantized spectral coefficients is described in the International Standard ISO/IEC 14496-3:2005(E), part 3, subpart 4.
However, it has been found that the quality of the coding of the spectral values has a significant impact on the bitrate that may be used. Also, it has been found that the complexity of an audio decoder, which is often implemented in a portable consumer device, and which should therefore be cheap and of low power consumption, is dependent on the coding used for encoding the spectral values.
In view of this situation, there is a need for a concept for an encoding and decoding of an audio content, which provides for an improved trade-off between bitrate-efficiency and resource efficiency.